


Written on the Body

by livrelibre



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: Community: kink_bingo, F/F, Femslash, Marking, Tattoos, Writing on the Body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-18
Updated: 2014-06-18
Packaged: 2018-02-05 03:09:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1803130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livrelibre/pseuds/livrelibre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The tattoos had started when they were still underground, before the Fall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Written on the Body

**Author's Note:**

> Contains references to non-con. Unbetaed. Started mumblety years ago for Kink Bingo so my grasp of Dollhouse details may be lacking.

The tattoos had started when they were still underground, before the Fall. It would be hard for the Dollhouse to put a recaptured Active in the field and inconvenient for any rich person to own their body when that body had its history and identit(ies) tattooed all over it. One of Echo's identities--Amber, a cultural anthropologist--had studied various cultures that used tattoos as remembrances of great events, individual and personal; as ways of marking rites of passage; as an indicator of status, identity and emotion.

 

Priya had some memories like that too and though she would later eschew any other body mod, the tattoos made sense to her. But she kept hers close, personal, in places where no one but the trusted would see and as warnings to anyone else who would violate her again. They were a way of fixing things in the mind too. Even if Echo lost this body (as she would again and again), the act of writing them down somewhere--in 1s and 0s, on paper, on skin was a record in addition to the traces in her mind.

 

Now, Priya leaned over Echo's body tracing her latest handiwork at the base of Echo's back. She was still an artist through and through and her hand had been steady on the tattoo gun. Priya had come to see the benefits of remembering, even the ugly things, and made her choices to remember or not carefully. She was equally careful in what she inscribed on others' skin, knowing that marks could not be taken back, even if they were covered over. Her hand was steady through the buzzing of the tattoo gun and she followed it with soothing touches on Echo’s side.

 

Echo breathed through the lingering pain and the endorphin rush as Priya swabbed the tattoo with alcohol and applied the gauze. It wouldn't be long before she had another addition to the collection. She fingered the mark, the symbol Priya had left on her skin at the base of her neck: Priya's name, her real name, the one she had chosen. Priya smiled and touched her hand there too. Echo felt the rush of another sort as they began the next part of their ritual, the naming of parts. Priya's slim fingers danced over each of the marks she made and followed the paths she had traced time and time again: the mark of their first blow against the Dollhouse, the mark where they had killed Boyd, the mark where she had inscribed Athena bursting fully formed out of the head of Zeus. She wasn't going to parrot the words, the identities that others created for her. Priya didn't need to fear looking back and losing her; she wasn't going anywhere.

 

Priya traced along those other invisible paths and scars, soothing away old memories and hurts, integrating them in with who and what they were together and Echo felt her skin come alive, inhabiting this body, this self, focused on this present where Priya's hand slipped into her pants and hovered over her wet center. Echo whispered yes, the last part of the ritual, and let Priya trace new marks into her wet flesh, invisible still but no less powerful, let the rush rise inside her and the world and the memories fall away, leaving only her in her skin.


End file.
